The Life and Loves of E. Nesbit by Eleanor Fitzsimons

Author:Eleanor Fitzsimons
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Abrams
Published: 2019-10-08T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 15

“ALWAYS SURROUNDED BY ADORING YOUNG MEN”

According to Ada Chesterton, Edith was “always surrounded by adoring young men, dazzled by her vitality, amazing talent and the sheer magnificence of her appearance.”1 These would-be disciples vied eagerly for her attention, since they realized that her patronage could benefit their literary careers. She spurned those she thought insincere. Edgar Jepson observed of Alfred Sutro, a partner in a firm of wholesale merchants who had ambitions to be a writer:

It even seemed to him that to round off his Literariness he ought to become one of Mrs Bland’s young men, and he set about becoming one. But she did not see eye to eye with him in the matter. Indeed she spoke to me of his effort with indignation; I gather that she thought it monstrous pretentiousness.2

Sutro succeeded as a playwright and was elected, with Edith, to the dramatic subcommittee of the Society of Authors.

Edith showed no such reticence in befriending Richard Reynolds. This Liverpool-born son of a brigadier general was nine years her junior and a brilliant scholar with a first-class honors degree (the highest undergraduate degree) in Classics from Balliol College, Oxford. A committed socialist, he joined the Fabian Society in 1890 and was appointed secretary. He worked as a barrister and a journalist before taking a job as a schoolmaster. Friends believed that he was passionately in love with Edith for more than a decade. It is possible that she named Richard Bastable, father of the Bastable children, as a tribute to him, since they attended the same college. She put a Richard into Harding’s Luck too.

It was Reynolds who had come to Edith’s aid when Paul contracted typhoid in October 1898 and needed to be kept in isolation. She had agreed to his suggestion that Iris and Rosamund stay in his rooms at Temple, even though they were obliged to sleep on his floor. Reynolds lived at Well Hall for several months. He was there for the census of 1901 but left for Birmingham a short time later to take up a position as schoolmaster at King Edward’s School. During the long school holidays he spent time with Edith in Dymchurch. He accompanied her on boating holidays too, and she mentioned him in a poem she sent to Iris’s friend Douglas Kennedy in June 1902:

Dorothy, dearest of my nieces—

Her dearness breaks one’s heart to pieces;

Iris, most aged of two dear daughters,

Shall dream beside the Medway waters;

And there with Esmond gay will be

Reynolds and Kennedy and me!

Although Kennedy was confined to a wheelchair, he loved boating and accepted her invitation to join them. She appears to have taken an almost motherly interest in him, and he told Doris Langley Moore that she sent him “hundreds of letters.”3 He may have informed her lame boy, Dickie Harding, in Harding’s Luck (1909). Her decision to allow Dickie to escape his disability by traveling back in time to live as able-bodied Richard indicates a troubling sympathy with ideas underpinning eugenics and seems horrifically patronizing now.

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